Friday, January 4, 2013

A Nigger Unchained: Django

I've decided to start off my first post for 2013 with a bang. What started out as just going out to watch a movie on Boxing Day, turned into an blog post idea about the contentious n-word - the nigger.

Looking forward to any thoughts on this topic.

A
Nigger Unchained: Django

Colonialism…has always claimed that the
“nigger” was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a “nigger”.

All the big hoopla around Quentin Tarantino’s instant classic, Django Unchained, starring the angry
runaway field nigger (Jamie Foxx), the brainwashed house nigger (Samuel L. Jackson),
the bloodthirsty nigger-hater (Leonardo DiCaprio), and the nigger Jezebel
(Kerry Washington), may not come from the movie’s cinematic and historical
wizardry, but because of the insecurity and racism of an overwhelmingly
ignorant White audience. Does my use of
the word “nigger” upset an academic audience conflicted and overwhelmingly
influenced by an opaque historical lens that applies our twenty-first century
views and beliefs on past events? Some
may argue that this is an unfair, and even racist, categorization of White
social norms and political correctness; you can even argue that since 1850 (Django was set in 1858) the picayune and
pejorative identity of the “nigger” has evolved to Negro, to Coloured, to
Black, to African-American, and now to a cornucopia of hyphenated and
non-hyphenated self-identifiers.

This article is
not intended to be a movie review, nor is it designed to persuade the reader
into believing that I plan on assuaging the insidious nature of the word
“nigger”; albeit historical and reclaimed by many in the Black community across
the United States as a term of endearment, I strongly believe that there is no
place in society for descriptors rooted in such violence, destruction, and
hatred. This article intends to explore
the “touchy” subject of the roots of Black identity, Blackness, and the
question of what a “nigger” really is in American society since the
mid-nineteenth century. I say, “touchy”
since this is a highly contentious and ongoing debate. I do not contend to be an authority on the
subject; however, I do intend to provide a syncretic mix of how the past
continues to influence the present in American society. For some, a nigger is no more than a
six-letter word used in the Black community; there are many who believe that
calling a fellow Black man or woman a “nigga” is no different than addressing
him or her as “brother” or “sister”.
This use has been debated throughout the scholarship and popular
culture, most notably when it comes to hip-hop and rap music. If Jay-Z, one of the most successful Black
crossover rap artists, is able to sell millions of albums – and one can argue a
large group of sales going to White suburbanites – by throwing around “nigga”
in most of his lyrics (a smash hit for 2012 was his collaboration with Kanye
West for the song “Niggas in Paris”), is it okay for Johhny McHale from Rhode
Island to call his sixth grade classmate Eli Winkowski his “ride or die nigga”? It may sound facetious, however, where does
one draw the boundary between imitation as a form of flattery and appreciation
as opposed to an excuse to vent deep seeded racialized beliefs through
discriminatory and hateful language? And
does it remove the term of “endearment” qualities from Blacks that have fought
for hundreds of years to neutralize its destructive etymology?

This line of thought intrigued me as I watched the
overall historically accurate Django
Unchained. As a historian I wondered
if most of the audience members understood that while it was a fictitious
narrative, the context and brutality of slavery was real. As a historian I wondered if at least half of
the people leaving the theatre would decide to scour the internet – or at least
Wikipedia – to learn a little more about the Antebellum South and the
institution of slavery. As a historian I
wondered if people in the theatre actually believed that Tarantino “created”
this story when Frederick Douglass and many other Freed slaves wrote their narratives
in the mid to late nineteenth century?
As a Black man I wondered if people really understood that those niggers
were my ancestors and that Broomhilda was my great-great-great grandmother; the
Mandigo fighters were my nineteenth century brothers; and Django was my long
lost father that I never knew. Did they
really think that? I doubt it. I am not so naïve to think that movie
watching is no more than a passive exercise and that most people just want to
see a Tarantino splatter fest like the Kill
Bill series. I do not believe that
every paying moviegoer is obligated with the social responsibility to
“understand” the message; whether we like it or not, cinema is not real
life. However, when confronted with a
fictitious, or real, topic or issue that makes us uncomfortable, unnerved, or
question our own beliefs, I think we must ask the question, “why”. Why did it make the White lady in the row in
front of me cringe when Whites called Blacks “niggers” in the movie? Why did she cringe even though the word was
used so much that you thought there was some kind of tally amongst the cast
members with the winner getting a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup and a box of
Uncle Ben’s rice? Better yet, why would
some people find it offensive when during slavery the common reference of an
African-American was to call him or her a nigger? The movie raised several questions about what
is socially acceptable in American society and the boundaries of political
correctness. While I applaud the
progress and the continued dialogue on race and racialization in the United
States, particularly since the post-War Civil Rights Movement, with the
proliferation of social media, questions remain about the pejorative
re-appropriation of the word “nigger”.
Better yet, similar to the coward-like autonomy of the Ku Klux Klan’s
white hooded robes as they burned crosses and lynched law-abiding fathers and
sons, social media has created a new avenue for the neo-racist hiding behind
modern technology. Once confronted with Django’s visual evidence of the brutally
violent roots of their ignorance in the darkness of a movie theatre, neo-racist
can no longer justify their racism as benign or sans malice as they hide behind 140 characters on Twitter.

What is most troubling is that most neo-racists do not
even understand the word “nigger”, nor do they understand the historical and
social complexity of Black identity.
They may know that it is a “bad word” to call Black people, but they do
not understand why. What is a
Negro? What is a Black person? What is a nigger? One cannot simply reply that a nigger is a
Black person. If that was the case, why
would anyone be offended while watching Django? Why would radio stations blank out “nigger”
from of all A$AP Rocky’s or Drake’s songs?
Some argue that there is no other two syllable word in American history
that embodies so much hate. Others argue
that the word has become the common pejorative epithet for the denigration of
the Black Self and the African-American community. There is nothing or no one lower than a
nigger; to be labeled a nigger is to be seen as non-existent and
worthless. If its etymology was not
based on the racialization of dark-skinned peoples of African descent, I would believe
that “nigger” would not have survived its diachronic and transgenerational
existence. However, similar to Pierre
Vallieres, leader of the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) niggerfication of
the Quebecois in his 1968 book, White
Niggers of America, a nigger is not confined to or always represented by
one’s phenotypic and ideological Blackness.
The problem is that historically and socially, one’s black skin colour was,
and is, the ultimate qualifier for his or her codification as a “nigger”. This idea that you had to be Black to be a
nigger, and that only Blacks can be niggers, facilitated the nihilistic structure
of external and internal Black hate that is rooted in American society up until
this present-day. To be classified a
nigger is to be subjugated to an ideological subaltern underclass in American
society; it is an unfortunate reality that has not changed since the end of the
Civil War.

The “nigger” is a diachronic parasite; it is a
historical cancer that survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great
Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, and even the election and re-election of
the first African-American President of the United States. It is an insidious lexicon leech that
continues to suck the blood of the integrity of individual rights and American
“freedoms”. It is a stain on the
socio-economic growth of the United States and why equality remains only a
dream and façade for those that built the nation. One of the greatest minds, Black or White, of
twentieth century America, Malcolm X, spoke on this paradox of progress for Blacks
in the 1960s in his autobiography.[2] In arguably one of the most telling
revelations of the Black condition in the one hundred years since the Civil War
and Emancipation, Malcolm X wrote how the “nigger” codification superseded all African-American
achievements. In an early 1960s exchange
with a “token-integrated” Black Associate Professor, one in which he said, “he
got me so mad I couldn’t see straight,” Malcolm X asked one of the most
poignant self-reflective questions any high achieving Black American has asked
him or herself at some point in their personal lives and professional careers. From The
Autobiography of Malcolm X:

He was ranting about
what a “divisive demagogue” and what a “reverse racist” I was. I was racking my head, to spear that fool;
finally I held up my hand, and he stopped.
“Do you know what white racists call black Ph.D’s?” He said something like, “I believe that I
happen not to be aware of that” – you know, one of these ultra-proper-talking
Negroes. And I laid the word down on
him, loud: “Nigger!”[3]

It must be disheartening to know that despite all of your academic and
professional achievements; your awards and accolades; the car you drive and the
house you park it in front of; and the size of your bank account, you will
always be defined by the colour of your skin.
Malcolm X did not mean to chastise a fellow Negro brother; however, he
wanted to let him know the reality of race and racialization in twentieth
century America. The Double
Consciousness that W.E.B. Dubois speaks of in his turn of the twentieth century
literary and cultural gem, The Souls of
Black Folks, forever contextualizes the achievements of African-Americans within
the racialized confines of their marginalized Black sense of Self and White
negrophobia. Building on Dubois’ monumental
theory, Malcolm X has shown that White racists will never see a Black man or
woman as their equal, irrespective of their socio-economic status in life. The Mudsill Theory established during slavery
– whereby Whites believed that no matter their depressed condition in life,
they were always to believe they were better than the most uppity
“token-integrated” Black – was another ideological paradox of hypocrisy that
survived socio-cultural transformation in the United States since 1850 to the
new millennium. You will always be that
“Black” doctor, or that “African-American” lawyer, or even that “nigger”
president.

The election, and
more importantly the re-election, of Barack (Hussein) Obama supposedly ushered
in a new era of a “post-racial” America.
Can we really say how much has changed since Malcolm X shouted to the
Black “token” Ph.D. in the 1960s when in 2012 people still believe that “no
NIGGER should lead this country”?[4] What about when “Americans” took to Twitter
on December 16th, 2012 to admonish the “stupid sand nigger” President
when the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) decided to cut from a football
game to show Obama’s speech from the Newton memorial service for the twenty
children and six adults tragically and senselessly gun-downed (by a White man)
at Sandy Hook Elementary school?[5] I put “Americans” in quotation marks because
how could any “true” American take to a public forum and call the most powerful
man in the world one of the most emasculating, denigrating, and hate filled
words in the English language? Yes,
social media has blurred the boundaries of accountability, common decency, and
common sense; however, there is an omnipresent and ominous relationship between
“nigger” and “Obama” in the digital world.
And where do these thoughts come from?
People that live, breath, work, and interact in the real world. I wonder what Malcolm X would have said if he
was alive to see that the most powerful man in the world – the President of the United States of America – was still called a
nigger. If it happens to Obama, what
hope do the rest of us have? Are Black
and African-American academics and “Black” topics in academia simply token
representations of a depressed, marginalized, and neglected field? Is Django
Unchained not a cinematic re-enactment of the past, but a mirror to how
present-day society sees and feels about the “niggers” among them?

So then, what does this all mean? What do I mean by being “Black”, or
“Blackness”, and most importantly, who and what really is a nigger? The psychologist and revolutionary mind,
Frantz Fanon, created one of the seminal and most influential works on Black
identity in Black Skin, White Masks. The roots of nigger, Negro, African-American,
and Black, go beyond the film, hip-hop, and politics; the codified identity of
dark-skinned humans is firmly entrenched in the fundamental social fabric of
the United States and the Americas as a whole.
Race and the word “nigger” are as American as apple pie. Worst yet, African-Americans were hung from
the very same apple trees as the strange
fruit White racists loved to taste.
The strange, picayune, and obfuscated identity of the African Negro in
the United States is a subject dissected by numerous scholars including Fanon. What must be acknowledged is that the
“nigger” is not real; it is a social construction designed to subjugate a class
of dark-skinned forced labourers during the institution of slavery. There is no such thing as an “authentic”
nigger, similar to there is no such thing as an “authentic” Black woman or
man. “Black” signifies an imagined history;
a Black person is a social construct. He
or she is as real as race is biological. He or she was, and is, created through
ignorance, prejudice, and a means for class and socio-economic exploitation,
which is justified through the hegemonic ideology of White racial superiority. A Black man, or woman, is not a person who
happens to be black in colour, but “Black” in existence.[6]

The idea of the
Black Self was created as a means for White colonial administrators, slave
traders, slaveholders, and Eurocentric ideologists to exploit, dominate, and
subjugate the colonized African and African-American. The deracination of the African, and the
subsequent misappropriation of his Black identity, manipulated and destroyed Black
self-worth.[7] “Black” became a negative codifier and
self-identifier; it consigned Black people to a position of racial and social
inferiority. “Black” is an ideology that
supports and justifies social inequality; it is the ideological means to
subjugate and oppress. It is an ideology
based on an illogical fallacy. A fallacy
in which scholars such as Radhika Mohanram argued, “‘Blackness’ was constructed
in order to function as a binary opposite to whiteness, and bring the latter
into meaning”.[8] One must have a “Black” to be able to
identify a “White”. The “Black” Other,
created a “White” us. Joanne Pope Melish
concurred with Mohanram that Whiteness was created through the exclusion of the
Black Other. Melish argued that
Whiteness in the United States was “a place where whites belonged and people of
color did not, where people of color and whites were fundamentally estranged”.[9] John Block Friedman wrote of the “monstrous”
races in Medieval art and thought and that the idea of Blackness can be linked
to the creative imagination of the unknown (darkness) in Greco-Roman
ideology. It created the belief of the
Other as an inferior being.[10] David Brion Davis argued that African and
African-American slaves were “historically linked to inferiority, ugliness, and
Blackness”, which subsequently facilitated the creation of universal
stereotypes – the racialization – of slaves where “Black” and “Blackness”
became negative colour codifiers.[11] It was supported by the Biblical “fact” of
the Curse of Ham and Christian ideology to justify European enslavement and
debasement of Africans and African-Americans.[12] Through “Christian socialization” and “the
mentality of the enslaver all housed in his black, ex-slave’s body”, Anton Allahar
argued that a society was created where “being black was devalued and despised,
even by black people themselves”.[13] Whites racialized and consequently
dehumanized African peoples by associating the belief that they were in fact a
“monstrous race” – a condemned and domesticated class in society. The ideology of Blackness was not emancipated
with the slave; “Black” continues to represent a lower and inferior class, and
a lesser being in present-day society.
It took African-Americans hundreds of years to be legally recognized as
equal American citizens, and the clock continues to tick on when Blacks in the
United States will be unequivocally accepted as equal partners in society.

The
perpetuation of the “nigger” moniker operates within the same paradigm as the social
construction of race and Black identity; it is a pejorative fabrication designed
to subdue and condemn. Fanon believed
that “the black man is not a man” and “the black is a black man; that is, as
the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a
universe from which he must be extricated”.[14] I contend that the Black man – and woman – a
person who is seen as “Black”, cannot free themselves from their ideological
ties to inferiority. The Black man is
not a man, he is an object, a commodification of Self. His inferior Self – his identity – is the
creation of the White man; “the black soul is a white man’s artifact”.[15] Nevertheless, when Fanon wrote, “Black men
want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the
equal value of their intellect”, and “for the black man there is only one
destiny. And it is white”, he fails to
acknowledge that “White” and “Whiteness” are social constructions.[16] A Black man does not want to whiten his skin;
history has shown through the ideology of the One-Drop Rule that colour is not
a definitive racial identifier. The
Black man’s “destiny” is to become the ideological “White” man. One would argue that “Whiteness” was
unattainable. Nevertheless, as “Black”
represented inferiority, “White” was its antithesis. Whiteness meant social equality in a
fundamentally unequal system. Fanon did
not explicitly define Whiteness, nor did he acknowledge that White supremacy is
a form of social control. White
hegemonic power and the ideology of Blackness facilitates the continued use of
“nigger” and the historical and current negative representations of
African-Americans.

Despite what some gun-toting right-wing
political pundits and academic institutions across the United States may think,
White superiority based on biological predisposition is a fallacy; it is not
real, nor is there any veracity in this claim.[17] Whiteness by birth does not make you “better”,
nor does being born with a darker pigmentation make you a nigger. Historically, the White American racist
convinced his inferior – the Black man – of his supposed “natural” inferiority. Much of this was done through physical
violence and psychological warfare especially following Emancipation and the
rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. That being said, the White racist may create
his inferior, but it is the inferior who must submit to his authority. If the African-American accepts their
ideological “Blackness”, then as Fanon wrote, “as long as the black man is
among his own, he will have no occasion…to experience his being through
others”, and “for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man”.[18] If the Black African-American is a
socio-historical fabrication, so then what is a nigger?

If we look at Fanon’s work, he
argues that a nigger is the lowest class of the ideological and fabricated “Black”
existence, and Black person. Simply put,
a nigger is a class-based reified creation of a socially constructed historical
fallacy; it is not real.
African-Americans “understood clearly how the term served to enact the
embodiment of innate, permanent inferiority”.[19] Following Emancipation, and I argue
throughout the course of American history from Andrew Jackson to Michael
Jackson, African-Americans always understood that the “nigger” was a tool used
to oppress, subjugate, and ridicule. According
to Melish, the pejorative term “nigger” was used once Whites no longer
controlled the physical condition of the African-American. In northern states in the nineteenth century,
Free Blacks did not constitute a majority of the population, nor did they live
in a colonized political nation-state; their displacement from enslavement to
“free” actors in the capitalist economy, however marginal, caused their
exposure to a new form of class discrimination.
A nigger is excluded from all participation in the social economy; it is
the neo-racists’ new whip and the African-American’s psychological chain of
mental slavery.

Fast-forward to the new
millennium and the rise of the “new” racism through social media, and the
insidious nature of the Obama Twitter comments becomes clear. Fanon himself said that he “was expected to
behave like a black man – or at least a nigger”.[20] Is this any different of what White racists
expect from their President? Countless
Americans, academics and the like, would argue that the United States has made
considerable strides in race relations since the mid-nineteenth century;
however, the laws may have changed and White audiences may have cried during
films like Glory, The Color Purple, Remember the Titans, Amistad,
and Malcolm X, but all that progress
is all for not if in 2013 a sixteen year old boy can take to social media and
call his (Black) President a nigger.
American history and social norms have programmed generations to come to
believe that the African-American is expected to “behave” a certain way – like
a nigger. He is expected to embody
ignorance, savagery, and an uncivilized nature.
A nigger is dehumanized; he is non-existent. He should act like a nigger, an ape, a
gorilla, a monkey. What is forgotten is
that a nigger is neither Black nor White – it is a representation of ignorance
and subservience.

After having read this article, some people
may decide to boycott Django Unchained. Furthermore, they might question my own Black
“authenticity” since I liked the movie.
They might ask: “how can a Black man like a movie where a White director
has his actors drop the n-word like it’s an invisible character? Didn’t he hear what Spike Lee said?!” My response?
If you decide to abstain from watching the movie because of the
“n-word”, you are ignoring a bigger problem in American history and society.

[6] At
times throughout this article I will use the pronoun “he” or “man”, but I refer
to both sexes equally.

[7] I
refer to the African as an individual black in colour prior to his creolization
in the Americas.One may argue that he
is “racially” and socially pure.An
African-American is one who is of African descent throughout the Americas.

[13] Anton
L. Allahar, “Unity and Diversity in Caribbean Ethnicity and Culture,” Canadian
Ethnic Studies 25 (1993): 81.Hegemonic ideology occurs once Blacks – and the society at large - have
indoctrinated this message of inferiority by the ruling White class.Hegemonic ideology allows for domination by
mass consent by the oppressor and the oppressed.